A few corporations are tearng apart our world while handing us scraps, and yet we love them. This is one of those articles to ignore, but it had a few words worth sharing.

the tech industry is decimating the rest of the planet’s wealth and stability.

Its companies — especially the Frightful Five of Apple, Amazon, Google, Facebook and Microsoft, which employ a select and privileged few — look poised to systematically gut much of the rest of the economy. And while Silicon Valley’s technologies could vastly improve our lives, we are now learning that they may also destabilize great portions of the social fabric — letting outsiders wreak havoc on our elections, fostering distrust and conspiracy theories in the media, sowing ever-greater levels of inequality, and cementing a level of corporate control over culture and society unseen since the days of the Robber Barons.

A look at what we could do to prevent the next crash as opposed to what we’ve done in the past.

The Fed missed the crisis in part because it has a dual mandate to keep unemployment and consumer price inflation low — and both were low before 2008. Real reform would add a third mandate: maintaining financial stability, and in particular stabilizing prices for assets like houses and stocks, which are not counted as “consumer prices” but now have a bigger influence on the economy.

Democrats ignore important issues like economic inequality at their own peril. Racism is important but it’s forest for the trees issue. More persons of color will benefit in the short and long run from addressing economic equality issues than by fighting white supremacists. Bannon and Trump get it and they bamboozled their followers into believing they would improve the economy. Of course history will show they didn’t improve economic opportunities for people of any color and they made racism popular again, but Democrats can give them license to do more of the same by chasing identity politics.

“The longer they talk about identity politics, I got ’em,” he said of Democrats. “I want them to talk about racism every day. If the left is focused on race and identity, and we go with economic nationalism, we can crush the Democrats.”

But there are many more voters in Trump’s camp who still consider themselves Democrats. Some live in the much-discussed zone of despair, places where opportunities for people without a college degree are few, and the opioid epidemic rages. These folks are persuadable, if the message is economic hope — something that Obama understood, and Hillary Clinton never did.

This doesn’t mean that Democrats should not speak out when a cop kills someone for driving while black. Nor does it mean that Democrats should not join with progressive institutions — the military and forward-looking corporations among them — when Trump turns back the clock on transgender rights, or equal opportunity.

But you can’t bang just one drum. Trump has said demonstrably racist things many a time, from his birther obsession to his taco bowl tweet. He still won, “on a straightforward platform of economic nationalism,” as Bannon noted.

“As long as Democrats fail to understand this, they will continue to lose,” he said.

So, even though Trump now threatens to shut down the government that he runs over his insane and unpopular border wall, even though he’s told 1,000 verifiable lies since he’s been in office, his horrid character will not be enough to help the forces of good.

Like this:

Are we caught in a can’t win situation between the climate and the economy?

If demand grows and we consume more goods and resources the climate suffers. If demand increases through population growth the climate suffers. If demand decreases the economy suffers.

Can we develop a world that’s not dependent on continuous growth for economic stability? Can we have an equitable world that’s not dependent on ever greater numbers of consumers?

It’s time to think about how we can live better not bigger.

Economic growth in advanced nations has been weaker for longer than it has been in the lifetime of most people on earth.
This slow growth is not some new phenomenon, but rather the way it has been for 15 years and counting. In the United States, per-person gross domestic product rose by an average of 2.2 percent a year from 1947 through 2000 — but starting in 2001 has averaged only 0.9 percent. The economies of Western Europe and Japan have done worse than that.

Of course The Drumpf is serving his own needs first. Of course he lied to those who voted for him. Of course those who voted for him were fools to believe that he would follow through on his promises to them.

He’s outsourcing our economic policy to Wall Street.

“Steve Mnuchin is just another Wall Street insider,” Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts said in a joint statement. “That is not the type of change that Donald Trump promised to bring to Washington — that is hypocrisy at its worst.”